A Nuisance No Longer
Students’ smartphones can enliven and enlighten an engineering classroom.
By Chris Rogers
The smartphone can be a major distraction, but it is in the classroom whether we want it or not. Every student has one, even in our partner K-12 schools, where most pupils qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. I learned this while speaking to elementary students in a summer program at the Tufts veterinary school. To differentiate engineering from science, I asked them to define each, working in teams of two or three. One student delivered an impressively detailed definition with great confidence. I must have looked surprised, because he happily raised his phone. For his generation, that’s where facts and definitions are found.
My goal is always to turn the classroom into a space where students find different solutions to the same problems, and thereby teach each other – and me. I’ve found the smartphone to be an invaluable tool. It has some amazing features, allowing anyone to find any fact – and evidence to support that fact – in seconds. A phone can let students share their work and ideas, learn from experts, interact in forums, and even act as a clicker (for example piazza.com). It can also be a calculator or a robot controller.
In a heat transfer class, students working together (at tables) can quickly look up material properties, estimate the fin efficiencies for various materials and geometries, and then compare across the classroom, spawning a conversation around which materials make good fins and which ones do not. Reading p-v plots in thermodynamics or even looking at the output of simulations in fluids can now be done quickly and easily.
The phone’s camera opens up the world of image processing and sensing. In high school physics, students have used their phones to video a ball bouncing and then used software (like the Vernier physics video app) to track the motion of the ball and compare it with known models. In teaching heat transfer last semester, I brought in the new FLIR infrared camera case for the iPhone (flir.com). The images catalyzed some excellent discussions as the students argued about which parts of the wall had more insulation, where the body lost most of its heat, and how different materials could feel colder or hotter and yet be the same temperature. Just by changing the lens through which they view the world, we can get them to eagerly discuss class content or appreciate and validate mathematical models.
As a robot-controller, the smartphone brings a number of advantages to robot design – from a touch screen user interface, to image processing, to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (and cellular) connection. One can even get rough positioning from the phone’s GPS hardware. The FIRST robotic competitions (USFirst.org) are starting this year with a cellphone at the center of their FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) competition. Most smartphones have built-in accelerometers, audio input and output channels, and some form of light sensor and buzzing motor, all of which can be integrated into the robot design. There are a number of companies (Romo, Woo Wee, and others) that sell robotic attachments for phones, and the larger world of telerobotics often relies on phones or tablets for all communication.
The phone can make the most difference in engineering education, though, as a documentation tool. Understanding the process the student goes through to solve a problem or design a solution is often very difficult if you have only the final product. Projects like Build in Progress at MIT (http://buildinprogress.media.mit.edu) make it easy for students to document the progress of their work and get feedback from the cloud. Note-taking software, like Evernote, helps students share their progress and and get just-in-time feedback. One of my indicators of success in class is how many students take pictures or movies of their work, since that means they are sharing their learning with their friends.
Maybe someday students will use watches instead. But in the meantime, I enjoy finding ways of leveraging phones to get students to think like scientists and engineers: questioning, testing, and iterating.
Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University. crogers@tufts.edu